Archive for Academics

Recently I read some thing calling for land reform in Pakistan. Land reform is important, but leftists need to be clear on the parameters and forms of land reform necessary. Here are some tentative thoughts.

It’s not enough to break up large landholdings and to distribute them amongst small farmers.

For many small farmers who already have possession of land, they lack the capital (that is, money) required to invest in the land to make it intensively productive. They cannot afford fertilizers, pesticides, appropriate seeds, and other forms of inputs needed to make things work out.

Additionally, some kinds of capital, especially machinery, requires extensive (not just intensive) farming. The smallholding patterns, with individual households making individual decisions about crop growth and consumption/sale, will and does get in the way of potential for larger scale farming.

Vivek Chibber’s trenchant criticisms of the Subaltern Studies school of Indian historiography in Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital (2013) have justifiably attracted considerable attention. Marxist critiques of postcolonial theory have a long pedigree, but at least since the 1990s they have been somewhat defensive in orientation. Buoyed by the emergence of mass movements in North Africa and in the West, Chibber seeks to present his contribution as a decisive blow.

Aside from the question of criticism, the engagement between Chibber and the Subaltern Studies project (SS) should also reignite debates within Marxism. At one point, Chibber describes SS’s Marxism as that of a “particular kind [that] would scarcely be recognized by many contemporary Marxists” (10).[2] Chibber refers specifically to SS’s supposed “amalgam of liberal and Marxist elements” and the resulting “Whiggish interpretation” of modernity that glorifies the role of the bourgeoisie, but he is actually making deeper claims about Marxism as a whole, that are not only analytical but also normative. This, too, is worth interrogating.

Often white (but not only white) “progressives” and “Marxists” will complain about how raising issues of racism or national oppression divert attention away from organizing people along class lines. How can the unity of the working class be achieved on an international level if we keep talking about racism and national oppression. There is a vulgar idealism at work here, the kind that imagines that because people think or talk about race, that’s why racism exists. “Gee, if all we did was stop thinking ourselves in terms of races, it would all go away,” or that racism and national oppression acquire a reality only on the level of discourse. This kind of view is just wrong.

When I talk about racism and class struggle I am not talking about the cute little things that a lot of us petty bourgeois racialized people like to talk about. We like to complain about white privilege as a cultural category alone, for instance. Like when white people wear blackface or wear geisha costumes. That shit is ignorant, but that is not even the primary problem of racism and class struggle. What’s more important is understanding the entire set of social relations that enable white people to even imagine thinking they can dress up as another race or culture. This is more insidious.

Yesterday I read Dipesh Chakrabarty’s key article for the umpteenth time. And I think that, while it raises some valid points, it goes too far. The point about our historical narratives always following in the footsteps of Europe is a valid concern, and one that does in fact apply to many iterations of Marxism as well in their peculiar formulations of the relationship between base and superstructure.

However, to plug everything (Gandhian peasant utopia to Marxist socialist revolution) into the same metanarrative of “Europe” as telos is intellectually dishonest, aside from flattening the myriad ways in which these projects are understood and debated by their practitioners. (Can we seriously say that the spread of Maoism in the 1960s and 70s from “east” to “west” was litte more than some privileging of “Europe” at the end of the day? That it was precisely such expansion of Maoist ideology that got some of the original Subaltern Studies folks to pursue a Gramscian understanding of peasant insurgency is overlooked by Chakrabarty.)

All of a sudden I find myself reading with keen interest this old school Dobb-Sweezy debate on the transition from feudalism to capitalism in Western Europe, and I’m thinking, why the fuck do I care? Part of it is that I want to move on to other mode of production debates, outside of the European context, and all of that shit. But then there’s something that Sweezy writes — that “we live in the period of transition from capitalism to socialism.” It occurs to me, then, that the reason I’m reading any of it in the first place is because I believe, without a shadow of a doubt, that if we aren’t ourselves now living in a time of transition from capitalism to socialism — a time when people are questioning the very roots of capitalism and searching for a humane and just alternative system of organizing the whole wide world — then we damn well ought to be, and I’d like to help make that transition happen.

A couple of years ago when I was at York University I remember a conversation between two other graduate students at a campus restaurant, in that campus mall. They were talking about capitalist development, and how it ought to be judged considering a radical critique and considering the betterment of people’s lives. The example of South Korea came up and the one student pointed out that living standards had gone up and people were living better lives than they had been living some fifty years ago in general, and that this was a result of capitalist development. What would a Marxist say to that? The other student tried to counter that a Marxist would talk about how capitalism alienates the worker from fellow workers, or something like that, trying to give a fairly abstracted answer to a fairly concrete question. It was clear the brother didn’t know much about South Korea.

Neither did, I for that matter. I don’t remember if I interjected to voice what I do remember thinking, that to the contention that capitalist development had raised living standards a Marxist would not, without concrete investigation, say much. The Marxist would go and study South Korea and see what trajectories its historical development had taken, and then come back with an answer about whether or not capitalist development was beneficial to it.

After racing through Manning Marable’s nearly 500-page biography of Malcolm X, recently released, I realized that I hadn’t learned anything significant, more than that which I already knew, except that Malcolm was not very happy in his marriage (I knew Betty wasn’t happy with Malcolm’s sexual performance at some stage in their marriage) and that he may have cheated on Betty a few times near the end of his life, just as she may have cheated on him. We also get some more details on Malcolm’s tourism/activism abroad, and details on the relationships Malcolm had with people inside and out the Nation of Islam. Sometimes, these details are almost mundane and gossipy. Overall, the book leaves one with an empty feeling.

I am confused by the analyses of the anglo-phone left with regards to the social revolts in Libya. The only thing folks seem able to muster are a series of bifurcated abstractions. Thus certain metaphors in the analyses of Libya prevail such as, “greed and grievance”, “patron and client”, “rapacious rule vs innocent population “, “madness vs sanity” etc. Absent from the discussion are: social forces, social base, achievements and contradictions of Libya’s Green revolution, contradictions of liberal-democracy, and the contradictions of market dependency on specific social formations. One of the results of such a skewed discussion is that liberal democracy is idealized as the only viable political order in Libya (or the rest of the world for that matter). This is because absent of an analyses of social processes (which the left seems incapable of doing), liberal democracy gets proffered as at least having the institutional checks and balances to keep evil at bay. Of course, historically we know that this is not true. In fact liberal democracy is very often the problem, as it also entrenches certain odd forms of non-state and state led dictatorship and rule. And no stage-ist theory of history can get around this problem. Liberal-democracy does not necessarily lead to things getting better, sometimes life becomes much more ironically cruel. Modestly, then, we can say that what we need is to build institutions that speak to the specific historical problems of a given social formation. And yet given that the category of evil has been one-sidely operationalized as the concept through which we think about Libya and Ghadaffi, the end result has been that we have all been led down the path as believers of liberal-democracy.

The way the term Arab is being thrown around these days is enough to give a person reason to pause while celebrating the victories of the people of Tunisia, Egypt and Libya. After all, in the present revolutionary context in North Africa there has been a deliberate effort to erase the fact that Libya, Tunisia and Egypt are all continental African countries. Moreover, to call one’s self Black or African or Arab is to use identity markers that are not indigenous to Africans or even the vast majority of people we now call Arab. The question then is who uses these identities and when? No doubt, mobilizing these identities can be useful for making certain kinds of political claims that advance the needs of African and Arab peoples (pan-Africanism, the Arab league etc). But still, we need to always ask for whom is this mobilization happening.

Cutting off the historical ties between so called Arabs and so called Africans (by which we mean black people, as if those kinds of people are easily identifiable) is a trick of Orientalist historiography (in the way Edward Said uses the term). And investigating the problem of Orientalist methodology is not just about raising the bogeyman of identity politics, rather what ends up happening is that Orientalist methods are often blindly adopted to conceal the multiple historical, political, and economic ties that connect so called black people to browner looking people. For example, Yemeni ancient and contemporary history has deep connections with Somalis, Eritreans and Ethiopians across the Red Sea (20 km), but the way the story gets told you would think Yemen was closer to Libya, and that the West Side of the Red Sea could be skipped in any story about Arabs. I would venture to say this is ridiculous. And I really don’t think we should accept Orientalist methods when thinking about what is an Arab or an African.

One of the narratives that has come about in response to the uprisings in Africa and West Asia is that the Western world needs to intervene to either protect the protesters or to help consolidate any emerging democracies. Jack Layton, the leader of Canada’s federal left-of-centre-left New Democratic Party, spoke at a rally for Egyptian freedom on February 5, 2011, and said that Canada and Canadians could offer

… to help the people of Egypt to construct … democracy using the knowledge and expertise that we have developed over so many years — which has fallen into some disuse lately. Bring our troops back home from Afghanistan and let’s start being envoys for peace in places like Egypt.

Clifford Orwin is a professor of political theory at the University of Toronto. Unlike Layton, he is a supporter of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Orwin often writes opinion pieces forthe Globe & Mail. His latest opinion piece is also featured on the home page of the department of political science.

In it, Orwin argues that uprisings do not straightforwardly lead to establishing and maintaining democracies:

… disgust with despotism, poverty, inequality and corruption is the easy part of the revolution. Lofty hopes don’t suffice for successful self-government, and may undercut it…. What’s needed is the development of institutions of civil society – schools for the practice of democracy.

Decades of repression, or government co-optation of oppositional movements, has led to a shell of a civil society. The people of Tunisia and Egypt have no experience “managing complex affairs.”